External Conflict vs. Internal Conflict*

External conflict used to be the primary form of conflict in genre or popular fiction. Only in more literary works did heroes grow, change, or even question themselves much. Your genre fiction protagonist knew he or she was a better person than the villain and had no reason to change. So the tension in the story was all about whether the hero could outwit or outfight the villain at the climax, which made for rather shallow characterization.

Today however, even writers of children's books and cartoons put much more emotional depth in their stories by giving their main characters internal conflict as well as external conflict. Here's an easy way to distinguish between the two in
terms of Dramatica theory...

External Conflict

The best way to understand external conflict is that it relates to the
Story Goal
. Dramatica sees every story as an effort to solve or resolve a problem
or achieve a goal. The Story Goal is the outcome being sought.

While most of the characters in your story will be involved in or
affected by this effort in some way or other, the main external
conflict will be between two characters.

Your Protagonist will be the primary character who pursues the
Story Goal and the person whose action or choice determines the outcome.
Your Antagonist will be the character opposed to the Story Goal, who
wants the Protagonist to fail, and who does everything in his/her power
to make sure the Goal is not attained.

In high school literature classes, we were taught that external conflict came in several varieties:

However, we can simplify this and say your Antagonist can be dressed up
in any guise (as a person, animal, force of nature, monster, society,
institution, machine, abstract idea, etc.). All that matters is that
he/she/it can effectively oppose the Protagonist's effort to achieve the
goal.

Most of the time, human Antagonists are the source of external
conflict in stories, simply because Protagonists tend to be human and a
conflict between two evenly matched opponents is more interesting. The
outcome is less certain.

It wouldn't be much of a fight, after all to pit your macho hero
against a lowly earthworm – unless you give that earthworm some
unnatural abilities to even out the odds.

Similarly, a reader might have a hard time accepting a human who
wrestles Mother Nature to the ground, unless Mother Nature had somehow
been dethroned and lost all her powers. Otherwise, battling gods or
Nature is a futile endeavour, the subject of tragedy. For instance, in
Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea, the sea is
the Antagonist which thwarts the old fisherman's goal of taking home a
prize fish. The Sea doesn't do this intentionally. It isn't even
possessed of consciousness or intelligence (except perhaps in the man's
mind). It's just a force too powerful to be beaten.

You might expect that an external conflict between a person and
society would be similar. Like Nature, society is also a large entity,
seemingly too big for a single person to combat. That's how it's
portrayed in novels such as George Orwell's 1984. However,
Western culture also has a fondness for Protagonists who stand up to
society and win (for example, the hero of the TV series, The Prisoner, always manages to resist the will of the society he's trapped in).

Of course, no matter how evenly or unevenly matched your
Protagonist and Antagonist are, external conflict alone is often not
enough to sustain your readers' interest.

You see, readers will come to know your main character throughout
the course of your novel. (For a discussion of how the main character
may or may not be the Protagonist, see
Main Character
.) They know what type of person he/she is, his abilities, and his
approach to solving problems. And if all your main character has to
contend with is external conflict, the story can appear a little
two-dimensional - even if you portray the external conflict in an
interesting and unexpected way.

If you really want to give your story some depth, you need internal conflict.

Internal Conflict

Internal conflict concerns your main character's self-doubt - his or her dilemma over the best way to achieve the Story Goal.

All of us have been in situations where we were outside our
comfort zone, where we were uncertain if our usual way of being or
behaving is the right way to achieve our goals.

For instance, suppose you spend several years at university being
the life of the party and hanging out with very laid-back,
unpretentious, Arts majors. Then one day, you have your first job
interview with a really big company. This prospect leads to some
internal conflict.

How should you present yourself at the interview? Should you
change your appearance and personality to look like someone who would
fit in with the corporate world? Should you buy a suit and some real shoes,
get a haircut, etc.? Is it time to drop swear words and colloquial
language from your vocabulary? Maybe you should lose your cynicism
about the corporate world and start gushing optimism and enthusiasm?

On the other hand, you might decide to stick with who you are.
After all, you've had success with your approach in other endeavours.
You get along well with people. The interviewers might value honesty
over pretension. Maybe this company has a more relaxed atmosphere that
rewards individuality and creativity more than conformity? Maybe you
would find more happiness working for a company that better fits your
values?

Either way, no matter how well you research the company ahead of
time, you still won't know for certain the right way to present yourself
until you actually get a job offer.

In this scenario, the external conflict is you vs. all the other
applicants competing for the job. The internal conflict is your dilemma
over the best way to present yourself at the interview.

Readers relate to characters who have internal conflicts as well
as external conflicts. More importantly, your main character's internal
conflict creates suspense, because readers won't know how he will
resolve his personal dilemma until the moment of crisis. Will your main
character make the right choice? What is the right choice? These
questions keep your readers interested in the story.

To repeat: your main character will begin your story with a
habitual way of handling problems. However, in the course of pursing
the Story Goal and coping with the external conflict, the main character
should start to feel internal conflict about whether his way of doing
things will result in victory.

The best way to create this internal conflict is to have your main character encounter an
Impact Character
– a character with a very different approach to solving problems. The
main character then has a reason to wonder whose approach is better –
his or the impact character's.

For instance, in the above scenario, let's imagine you have a
roommate who's also applying for jobs. But unlike you, he fits the
corporate mold perfectly. He's the kind of guy who wore a suit and tie
to his university classes. He speaks the language of the corporate
world naturally and espouses corporate values. Plus, he's so optimistic
and confident about his chances of landing the perfect job that you
start to wonder whether you should change your style to match his.

If you were writing a novel about such a scenario, you could create more
suspense by putting in events that show the advantages and
disadvantages of both approaches. But the better the impact character's
approach looks, the more pressure there will be for the main character
to change.

Contrary to some schools of thought, the main
character doesn't actually have to change. In some stories, the main character
resolves his internal conflict by sticking with his own approach. In
some stories, this works. In some it doesn't. In some stories,
adopting the impact character's approach works. In some it doesn't.
For more on this, see the article on
Plot Development.